The twenty-ninth Banned Books Week Sept. 25 through Oct. 2 celebrates not only the freedom to choose what to read but also the freedom to select from a full array of possibilities.

This year’s theme is “Think for Yourself and Let Others Do the Same.” The Jackson County Public Library will be displaying books that have been challenged, restricted, removed or banned and providing information on who objected to them and their reasoning.

“The Jackson County Public Library does not condone or participate in censorship. We believe in S. R. Ranganathan’s philosophy: ‘For every reader there is a book and for every book there is a reader,’” said Dottie Brunette, Jackson County Librarian.

Reading Room

“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

We live in an age — the relativity of truth — in which Orwell’s adage seems as dated as monocles or top hats. Just as Darwin’s theory of evolution led to Social Darwinism, a philosophy pitting one human being against another with survival of the fittest as the supreme law for success, so Einstein’s theory of relativity changed popular philosophy and cultural mores as radically as it did the study of physics.

This Must Be the Place

Outside the Tipping Point Brewing windows on Main Street, heavy snowflakes cascaded upon downtown Waynesville last Wednesday night. Cars cautiously cruised through the intersection, with the snowfall increasing as the minutes ticked by.